Fifth of male council workers ‘are facing wages cut'

15 March 2007

Cuts to jobs and services will be needed to fund equalising pay for council workers, and a fifth of male employees can expect a pay cut, council leaders have warned.
The Local Government Employers (LGE) claims that there are no alternatives to covering the £1bn ongoing extra annual cost of paying those carrying out predominantly ‘female’ jobs the same as mainly ‘male’ jobs on the same job grade.
The £1bn cost assumes that a fifth of workers will have their wages cut, typically by £2-5,000, with men working in highway maintenance gangs and as refuse collectors among those hit.
The warning comes after ministers rejected an LGE call to ease the financial strictures on local authorities to cover the £1bn extra salary cost of equalising pay (Surveyor, 8 March). Legal cases are making it still harder to introduce acceptable and affordable deals, according to council leaders.
The third of councils that have completed pay reviews have typically introduced ‘pay protection’ for men affected by cuts to preserve their pay for a limited period. But this, too, has been branded as discriminatory by the courts, in a ruling against Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council, which is being appealed.
Mick Brodie, director of the North East regional employers organisation, told Surveyor: ‘It’s becoming impossible to reach agreements. There’s huge uncertainty over what constitutes a lawful bonus scheme.’
The discriminatory element in the pay packets of predominantly male jobs, such as those in maintenance gangs, is usually in bonus payments that have effectively become part of take-home pay and bear no relation to performance.
Brodie fears that the ruling against Redcar & Cleveland could mean more industrial action, because unions are unlikely to agree to pay cuts without pay protection.
‘We could be looking at huge industrial unrest.’ The North East would be one of the hardest hit regions, because many authorities have not contracted out manual highways and waste jobs, which removes the equal pay liability.
Brian Strutton, GMB national secretary, agreed there was more Whitehall could do, including lifting the cap on money that can be capitalised. But councils ‘cannot plead poverty’, he said.
‘Local authorities have £4bn in unallocated reserves, and unions have accepted three years of low pay deals to allow councils to meet the extra costs,’ he continued. In some situations male pay was ‘unjustifiably high,’ but that did not apply to manual workers carrying out road repairs.
Cutting the pay of someone only earning £18,000 was ‘a travesty’, and was not what was intended when equal pay legislation was introduced, he added.

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Fifth of male council workers ‘are facing wages cut'

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